


the six stages of falling in love with her

by quidhitch



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/M, makorra week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 06:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4169799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quidhitch/pseuds/quidhitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>one.</p><p>The first time he sees her, really sees her, is when she kicks down the door of a potential hangout for some of Republic City’s most notorious criminals.</p><p>He’s crouched up behind the door, expecting to take point in this situation because what would she know about clandestine gangster meetings, but pauses when her disdain-filled eyes catch on his for a second, and then she’s delivering one well-placed kick that sends the structure toppling down.</p><p>She walks past him, not sparing another glance in his direction, and he remains crouched behind the door, unable to be anything but small, maybe to accommodate the sheer enormity of her presence.</p><p>He stares after her in wonder (and terror) and understands, in that second, what it must be like to have the strength of a 100 lives burning underneath your skin - no wonder she’s so restless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the six stages of falling in love with her

**Author's Note:**

> some kids on the block are saying it’s makorra week and i asked myself am i still weak for these losers? the answer is yes. always. this kind of works for both beginnings and break up. loosely inspired by this: http://quidhitch.tumblr.com/post/105876406982/one-you-see-her-for-the-first-time-and-shell

**one.**

The first time he sees her,  _really_  sees her, is when she kicks down the door of a potential hangout for some of Republic City’s most notorious criminals.

He’s crouched up behind the door, expecting to take point in this situation because what would  _she_  know about clandestine gangster meetings, but pauses when her disdain-filled eyes catch on his for a second, and then she’s delivering one well-placed kick that sends the structure toppling down.

She walks past him, not sparing another glance in his direction, and he remains crouched behind the door, unable to be anything but small, maybe to accommodate the sheer enormity of her presence.

He stares after her in wonder (and terror) and understands, in that second, what it must be like to have the strength of a 100 lives burning underneath your skin - no wonder she’s so restless.

He lies awake that night thinking about the kick, even slips out of the warmth of his covers a couple times to try and imitate it, but he doesn’t feel the power he saw in her eyes. He makes a small note, assuming he can swallow his pride, to ask her how she did the next morning at practice.

He thinks that’s the end of it as he climbs back into bed, but his mind doesn’t stop racing, remembering the strength of her voice, her willingness to help, her smile that knocked him off his feet and grounded him all at the same time. Before he knows it two hours have passed by and he still isn’t asleep, just rolling around his too-warm sheets wondering if he imagined the way she seemed to constantly be stealing glances at him, as he if he were anything worthy of fascination.

He turns over his pillow for the millionth time that night and stares at his ceiling in misery,  _what is this feeling in the pit of his stomach and when will it go away._

**two.**

If spending two hours thinking about her smile was hard, spending a day trying to find her after she’s been kidnapped by corrupt politician is agony.

Sitting by her bedside for the following four hours also isn’t a walk in the park, but it gives him time to commit her features to memory (he’s suddenly realized that the only thing worse than never seeing her again is never even being able to _remember_  what it felt like in the first place).

So he sits and he watches and he says the words ‘she’s here, she’s fine’ to himself over and over as she shifts quietly, lazily in her sleep.

When she finally wakes up, blinking sleep out of her eyes, he pulls her into a hug a little too quickly and blushes, whispering apologies into the curve of her neck.

“Hey Cool Guy,” she says, voice weighed down with sleep, her arms looping around him in slight surprise, “I’m  _fine_.”

He doesn’t say anything, just holds her to him, and tries to silence all the voices in his head screaming  _too much, too close, too warm, too fast_.

When he pulls back to look at her, she holds him there for a second, and their eyes lock and he thinks  _shit. Shit,_ this might as well be a goddamn love confession because she can see it in his eyes and he can see it in hers and there’s no way he can take anything back now.

She breaks away first, glancing around the room with un-Korra-like nervousness, and he calls out without looking away from her, in a voice that doesn’t quite sound like his own, “Korra’s awake”.

**three.**

They both work too much.

She spends nearly every minute in and out of council meetings and restoring people’s bending, and he’s trying to convince Chief Beifong that his list of admirable qualities is longer than his rap sheet, which is a very large and time consuming undertaking.

He doesn’t spend as much time with her as he wants to, but he’s also pretty sure he’s obsessed with her and said amount of time is probably really unreasonable anyways.

He holds onto the simple things, though, like her falling across his lap on a warm summer day and declaring she’s going to sleep for a decade and trap him in the bed, keeping him as her prisoner slash really large pillow.

“You’re saying that’s not what I am to you already?” he asks, tugging the case report he was reading out from underneath her and dropping it on his bedroom floor.

She wrinkles her nose, considering it, before propping herself up on her elbows and pressing a kiss against his mouth.

“I mean,” she says, plucking his case report off the floor and handing it back to him before snuggling against his stomach, “I use you for sex, too, so if you want to work that into the title.”

He blushes and rolls his eyes, pretending to go back to his case report as he strokes her hair and waits for her breaths to even out. She’s asleep surprisingly quickly, which means she overworked herself today, and he peeks at her from under the manila folder with eyes full of concern.

It momentarily catches him off guard to see her so still, and he somehow finds this more unnerving than when she’s awake and crackling with energy. He stares at her, kind of thinking about how this is really creepy but mostly thinking about how she is simultaneously the most adorable and terrifying phenomenon he’s ever encountered.

He spends the next hour afraid to move or breathe too deeply in case he accidentally wakes her up and she shaves off his eyebrows in punishment.

**four.**

“…I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here,” is the first thing he blurts out when she crawls into his hut at two in the morning.

“This is technically  _my_  dad's property,” she says, crossing the room in three long strides and pulling off her coat ( _how can she do that it’s so fucking cold_ ), “it’s biologically predetermined that I am here.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he breathes as she sits next to him on the suddenly very small bed he was given. It’s dark, and the only light in the room comes from a small window just opposite her. It falls across her a little too harshly, illuminating half her face and leaving the rest in darkness, and his breath quickens because it’s really fucking beautiful.

“Whatever,” she says, moving closer to him and out of the light, and suddenly her hand is skimming up his bicep and he’s swallowing, thick and nervous.

“We shouldn’t,” he tells her when she tangles her hands in his hair and kisses his jaw, pushing him up against the bed frame so the wood digs into his back. She’s not listening to him, she’s never listening to him, and her fingers are pulling at the edge of his shirt and he’s not telling her to stop.

“Why?” she whispers it against his neck so chills run down his spine. He’s warm all over. The cold of the South Pole is suddenly not a problem.

“…Y-your dad.”

She gives him a look. “That’s a very weird reason, Mako, I didn’t think you were into that kind of-”

“Shut up,” he breathes, leaning his head back against the frame and closing his eyes as she laughs insensitively at him. “His arm is bigger than my head.”

She sighs and climbs off his lap, shimmying under the covers next to him and muttering something about how she can’t believes he thinks her dad is scarier than her, before turning on her side and gesturing he should do the same.

“Somehow I don’t think he’ll find this situation anymore favorable,” he says, sliding down next to her as she kicks off her shoes and pants. He wraps an arm around her anyways, though, and presses his face into the base of her neck.

“I’ll sneak out early tomorrow morning,” she says, the words broken off by a yawn as she traces idle patterns into the arm thrown over her waist. Her touch surprisingly gentle. “Naga likes to run before the sun rises anyways.”

Everything about her seems lighter here, in her home. She walks across the snow like it’s concrete, her boots barely even sinking into it, and blinks ice crystals off her eyelashes with a smile flits on and off her face, never permanent but never gone for too long. He hates the cold and he hates the endless white but he could definitely get used to that smile.

He thinks about that when she wakes him up at 4 AM by nearly knocking over a lamp while trying to get her pants on, and these thoughts devolve, as they usually do, into ones about how the world is her home, she’s the avatar, she’s too big for him, she’s too important for him, she’s too beautiful for him-

It all falls away when she kisses his lips, briefly, because they both have morning breath, and smacks his forehead, the words “go back to sleep, loser” trailing behind her as she tugs her last boot on and leaves the hut.

He falls back against the bed and his mind wanders, weirdly, to something he’d overheard yesterday about betrothal necklaces.

**five.**

_Casual casual casual casual casual_.

She pushes him into the dark alley behind Narook’s, kissing him like he’s wanted her to kiss him for months, and he can only assume that’s what this is.

 _Casual casual casual casual casual_.

He can do it. He can do casual, even when she’s nipping at his collar bone like that and there’s a very big chance he’s going to go into cardiac arrest if she doesn’t explain what is happening very, very soon. He shouldn’t be kissing her back. He shouldn’t be pulling her closer. He shouldn’t be one hair grab away from telling her he’s still hopelessly in love with her.

 _Casual casual casual casual casual_.

He hates this, this is torture, her skin is too tan, her eyes are too blue, her smell is edged with something that is so unmistakably her, and he is in agony.

Unfortunately, the only thing he can think of that’s worse than kissing her is not kissing her.

She gives him five minutes of stolen breaths and sloppy hands before pulling away, straightening his collar, and telling him in a short, clipped voice she’s got to get back to air temple island before Tenzin sends out a search party, and also that they’re probably banned from Narook’s because she put all their drinks on the tab of some reporter who’d been giving her bad press lately.

He squeezes his eyes shut and leans back against the grimy wall as she walks away, the dampness of the stones only registering after she’s long gone. She’s terrible. She’s the worst person he’s ever met and he was probably never in love with her, he probably just  _hated_  her so intensely he mistook it for something else, why would she do this to him, she must hate him too.

Ironically enough, when he closes his eyes and drags a hand through his hair, trying to think calming thoughts, she’s the first thing that comes to mind, telling him in a shaky voice that she’ll fix it and that everything is going to be okay.

**six.**

The worst part is seeing olive-skinned girls swathed in a thousand different shades of blue who _aren’t_ surrounded by air that crackles with their electricity and their noses are wrong and their eyes don’t make Mako’s insides feel like mush. 

The worst part is Bolin making jokes that she would’ve loved, and even though he  _knows_  she’s not there, even though he’s had year to process it, he still glances around the room hoping to catch a glimpse of her smile.

The worst part is how he refused to put away or even move the armband she forgot on his bedside table the night before she left, and how everyone who came in and out of his room would stare pitifully at the fine layer of dust that had built up on that place he refused to touch, for fear he’d lose more of her.

She’s been gone for fourteen months and he’s not really sure what’s real and what isn’t anymore, and he searches desperately for some faceless, nameless being in control of the universe to blame for her absence, though most nights he comes up empty.

He will never forget the way they fit against each other out of spite for whatever it was that took her away from him, but he hears the words 'move on’ from too many people not to at least try and distance himself from the memory by way of long hours and too much alcohol.

He boxes up her things. He moves the hairband. He goes on the most awkward date in the history of awkward dates. He gets promoted. He misses her less. It gets bearable.

 _…And then she comes back_ , and he’s thrown heart first into the cycle again.


End file.
